Life management.

I have a buncha crap I use to keep on top of my goals.

Notes and calendars are for goal management.

Goal: I MUST attend to my contractual obligations.

I am contractually obligated to have my butt in a seat clicking buttons to make money. There are temporospatial components to this goal. If the completion criteria of the goal involves being at a specific place at a specific time, then the distance between here and there is mighty important.

Calendar event repeating logic; consider a meeting that happens every 2 weeks on Wednesday. There was a Rust project that parsed the strings used by iCal or whatever. I remember reading the article about it. How might I find that article again? TODO: insert link here.

If the distance between NOW() and GOAL() is GREATER THAN “2 minutes” THEN CANNOT RELY EXCLUSIVELY ON BRAIN. We MUST outsource partial responsibility for meeting this goal.

Alarms for waking up and recycling are permanent fixtures in my clock app. They repeat every week. When I toggle one of the alarms off, say, the 11:00 p.m. Recycling alarm that repeats every Sunday, the app gives me a button to “Turn back on for October 5” (it is currently 10:54 p.m. on September 28th.)

What is the output behaviour of these alarms?

The device manifests sound and vibrations at the designated time until acknowledged. This behaviour has a low failure rate for arresting operator attention and reducing the risk that a goal is missed.

Potential caveats to the ability of alarms to meet goals include:

If I am aiming to catch a bus, or am obligated to pick someone up at the airport, then alarms are preem for ensuring timely departure to meet such goals.

Calendars are suited for longer time horizon goals. If two goals have coinciding completion windows, then satisfying one goal may occlude the completion of another.

Calendars help track what time slots have already been allocated, making it easy to identify conflicts when scheduling other activities.

If you find yourself scheduling so many activities that manual allocation is growing tedious, such as organizing a sports league or allocating classrooms, then check out Prolog. – The Power of Prolog – School Timetabling with Prolog – https://www.metalevel.at/prolog/timetabling/

I use Google Calendar, which makes it easy to attach email reminders to my calendar events.

Google Calendars is also integrated with Google Tasks, which is a simple checkbox task tracker similar to the ye olde Apple Reminders app. These Tasks can have due dates assigned to them, have push notifications on my phone, appear in the calendar if a date is assigned, and can be set as recurring.

As with every task system, the atrophy can be easily observed in the items that have been present in this simple system marked as “overdue – 26 weeks ago”.

Some examples: – Set up a timelapse app on a spare phone because it would be cool – Perform some data science to make graphs of message frequency calculated from exports from various chat applications

Just did some chores.

Goal: find the link for the previous todo.

Tried: searching Google Keep for “event” and “rust” (two separate searches), was unable to locate matching item.

Tried: I have a folder in my documents named “articles” where I ctrl+s some webpages I find interesting.

My 11:40 PM recycling alarm just went off. I have two, because sometimes I'm occupied when the 11:00 PM one goes off and I've been burned before.

I can't ctrl+s a website when I'm on my phone tho. Instead, I can hit the share button and share the URL to OneDrive and manually navigate to the directory in the save dialog where it will save a txt file with the URL. Close enough. Bit of a pain though.

There's 120 items in this articles directory. I ain't readin' all those names.

🎯 Likeliest file: 👉 Marching Events_ What does iCalendar have to do with ray marching_ _ pwy.io.html (or its .txt / Hacker News mirror versions) That’s almost certainly the one that discusses parsing iCalendar repeat strings (possibly with Rust).

So here's the blog post

Basically, this being-a-responsible-human[✝] shit is complicated and trying to codify it into a rules system is equally complicated, and liable to shatter at the encounterance of anything not conforming to the system.

[✝] languagejones – Linguists just made a breakthrough in defining a 'word. ' No, really https://adele.scholar.princeton.edu/publications/english-phrase-lemma-construction-when-phrase-masquerades-word-people-play-along

caption: a text box with a youtube url

vs

caption: a text box with a url with the title of a video instead of the url itself

Being organized is about levers.

caption: “Give me a firm place to stand and a lever and I can move the Earth.”

(image url)

I made a tool that lets me copy a markdown-formatted YouTube URL with the click of a button

caption: a YouTube webpage with buttons below the video player, followed by a note taking section:

I use tools other people have made, like ShareX, to make it easy to take screenshots, OCR, measure stuff, pick colors, etc.

Caption: Using ShareX to screenshot the process of screenshotting the process of selecting a region of the screen to OCR

The screenshots from ShareX go to a folder that is being backed up by OneDrive, which gives me straightforward access from my phone.

If you can't find what you're looking for, then taking notes might as well be going to write-only memory (WOM)

Try this alternative to Windows Explorer: https://filepilot.tech/

I remember hearing the WOM joke in uni. I wonder if I can retrieve these memories?

Apparently, yes, without having to ripgrep through exports.

if you don't want regret, just get write only memory

Ive forgotten the benefits of using a linked list Bennet No hard limit on number of data points stored at the cost of higher access time a Disk, that's probably not a But as a proponent of the WOD concern for you

Noah You all scoff at the idea of when I know at least a third of you cant even read your own handwriting after a week Think of the efficiency of this new storage, you dont need to worry about disk formatting, data corruption, overwriting old data. Just spit bits onto the disk at an unparalleled speed.

See also: Mongo DB Is Web Scale

Browser history, WindowsKey+V, plaintext notes, Google Keep, calendars, clock app alarms, ShareX screenshots... notes only have worth in their ability to be retrieved when needed.

Otherwise, we could just live in hedonism without worrying about the future.

But I can see the future, and the future has me thinking of a meme from years ago and lamenting that I can't freaking find it.

caption: fortune telling meme – I see you alone with a lot of notes, jeepers that's a lot of memes

I'm in the privileged position that I am very good with compootr

On a research binge and have a bazillion tabs open? Create a browser extension to pop open a text area with all your tabs as markdown.

Too many browser windows open? Create a browser extension to move all the tabs into one window

Too many files? Create a CLI tool to read the master file table to search 15 million paths in 17 seconds

In the end, it's all about context management.

YC Root Access – Advanced Context Engineering for Agents

I use note taking as a way to allow myself to forget about everything.

If I know it's in a file somewhere, I know I have the tools to find it again.

If I know it's in an alarm somewhere, I know I will be reminded when the time is right.

If I know if it's in a calendar somewhere, I know I won't schedule another activity for the same timeslot.